The Skinny On Aussie Solar Printer: It’s Wide

Two years after they embarked on a solar-cell printing initiative, Australian researchers are showing off cells the size of A3 paper – that’s about 16.5 by 11.7 inches – spit out by a $200,000 machine.

The researchers in the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium (VICOSC) – a collaboration between CSIRO, the University of Melbourne, Monash University and industry partners – say their printer uses semiconducting inks to “print the cells straight onto paper-thin flexible plastic or steel.” They compared it to the sort of screen printing used to put images on T-shirts and say the machine can crank out 10 meters per minute, or about one cell every two seconds.

Researcher Scott Watkins with a printed solar cell (image via CSIRO)

These cells produce between 10 and 50 watts of power per square meter (a typical crystalline solar cell might produce around 150 watts per square meter). Not a ton of power, but enough to be useful for some purposes, perhaps.

“There are so many things we can do with cells this size,” researcher Scott Watkins said in a statement. “We can set them into advertising signage, powering lights and other interactive elements. We can even embed them into laptop cases to provide backup power for the machine inside.”

The new solar cell printer can print cells up to 30 cm wide (image via CSIRO)

“Eventually we see these being laminated to windows that line skyscrapers,” team leader David Jones said. “By printing directly to materials like steel, we’ll also be able to embed cells onto roofing materials.”

4 Comments

daveca

Incident radiation is an average of 3Kw /m^2 per DAY in the US (NREL data)

and thats distributed over TWO hours around noon.

This is FIFTY? Talk about miserable efficiency.

So at 10% system efficiency (panel losses, conversion and storage losses and 10 % is generous, 8 is more like it) youd need , for a TWO hour day where the energy input is anywhere near 3Kw incident, SIXTY SQUARE METERS to run an air conditioner system

Pete Danko

Hi Dave,

Do you know the dimensions of the Sanyo Gaia panel? If you could send me a link to the information, I’d be much appreciative (I looked around but couldn’t find it). The thing is, solar pv panels are almost always larger than a square meter. For instance, SolarWorld sells a 255W panel that’s 1.6 square meters – 1.675m by 0.951m. So per square meter, its output is 159 watts. And Kyocera says right on their website, “With typical crystalline solar cell efficiencies around 14-16%, that means we can expect to generate about 140-160W per square meter of solar cells placed in full sun.” So while there is of course a lot of variation, I do think the 150 watt per square meter rule of thumb is a pretty good one. The funny thing, I mentioned it not to make this new technology appear competitive, but to make the point that the new technology produces at a relatively tiny rate compared to typical solar PV.